Re-Plumbed

26 October 2026. Figures and platform data are as of the dates stated in the text.

Interest disclosure: T-OpenAI and T-Kalshi are tokenized loan participation rights providing economic exposure linked to those companies' pre-IPO valuations, each issued through a dedicated issuing subsidiary. T-SpaceX, issued through its own dedicated issuing subsidiary, provides economic exposure linked to SpaceX; following the SpaceX listing, the investment underlying T-SpaceX is being divested. Redemption opens only once a Redemption Start Date is announced, and as of 26 October 2026 none has been. T-Tokens settle on Solana, a public chain, and can move between wallets, which places them on one side of the divide this piece describes. The argument here favors that side, and Tessera has a commercial interest in it being right. T-Tokens are not in any of the figures below (RWA.xyz, checked 26 October 2026). Tessera has no arrangement with BNY, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, DTCC, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, Nasdaq or the Canton Network, issues no product referencing any of them, and plans none. Tessera's founder worked at JPMorgan earlier in his career, and this piece discusses JPMorgan. Tessera, and entities under its control, hold related exposures. Read what follows with that in mind.

Set stablecoins aside, since they are a different product, and this month's largest tokenization numbers came from places no retail holder can reach: a repo ledger and a bank's payment network. A first came from the same kind of place, a custodian working on its own private ledger.

Broadridge reported that its Distributed Ledger Repo "processed an average of $359 billion in daily repo transactions during September, with volumes totaling $7.5 trillion" (Broadridge, 8 October 2026). Five days later BNY said it had "completed a triparty repo workflow with Citadel Securities using a tokenized representation of a U.S. Treasury, marking the first use of tokenized assets on a major triparty repo platform" (BNY, 13 October 2026). On 19 October JPMorgan gave Kinexys "over $4 trillion in cumulative transactions since inception, with an average daily transaction volume of $7 billion" (JPMorgan, 19 October 2026), a figure that covers the whole platform, payments included. DTCC, for its part, has said since May that it "plans to launch the service in October 2026" (DTCC, 4 May 2026). As of 26 October we have found no announcement from DTCC that it has.

The Broadridge and JPMorgan figures measure activity: a day's volume, a month's, a running total. The other side of tokenization, where tokens can move between wallets, is usually measured as a balance, and the two are different kinds of number. That difference is part of the story. On RWA.xyz, tokenized US Treasuries that can move to wallets outside the platform that issued them were worth $14.65 billion in data of 25 October 2026, and the site counted 85,924 addresses holding tokenized Treasuries. Addresses are not the same as holders.

That side is not retail at the top either. None of its five largest Treasury products, ranked by value, is open to US retail buyers. Three are sold only to qualified or institutional buyers, and one of those is JPMorgan's own OnChain Liquidity-Token Money Market Fund, which takes a minimum of $1 million from qualified institutional buyers and non-US institutions. The other two are sold only to non-US investors (RWA.xyz, same data). JPMorgan therefore sits on both sides of the divide. What the wallet side has, and the repo ledgers lack, is tokens that move.

Most of the Larger Total Is a Daily Repo Figure

RWA.xyz divides tokenized assets into two groups. "Distributed" assets "can be moved to wallets outside the issuing platform and transferred between wallets." "Represented" assets "cannot," and for them the blockchain "primarily serves as a recordkeeping and reconciliation layer" (RWA.xyz, framework post of 21 November 2025). The same post describes the represented model this way: "Rather than expanding investor access, this model serves institutional participants seeking improvements to enhance their operational workflows."

The split itself is sound. The difficulty is what sits in the larger half. RWA.xyz's home page put distributed assets at $39.00 billion and represented assets at $389.25 billion (data of 25 October 2026). Broadridge's repo ledger accounts for $343.02 billion of the represented figure, or 88.1% (our arithmetic), and RWA.xyz's own page for that platform labels the series "Daily Repo Turnover." The represented total therefore adds one day's repo activity to standing token balances.

How far that overstates what is outstanding depends on the trades. For overnight repo, a day's volume is close to the amount outstanding; for intraday repo, it overstates it. Nothing we have read from Broadridge or RWA.xyz gives the split. Whichever way it falls, most of the distance between $389 billion and $39 billion is one platform's daily repo figure.

Where the Activity Ran

All of this ran on ledgers built for institutions. In BNY's trade, "a tokenized representation of the security was recorded on BNY's private digital ledger and settled within minutes," the bank said, "settling near-instantly rather than on the standard T+1 settlement cycle" (BNY, 13 October 2026). Broadridge's repo ledger runs on Canton, which Broadridge describes as "a privacy-enabled blockchain network connecting financial institutions" (Broadridge product page, read 23 October 2026). Kinexys has been described as permissioned (CoinDesk, 29 June 2026), although JPMorgan's 19 October release concerned putting JPM Coin on Ethereum.

The boundary between private and public rails is less clean than that list suggests. DTCC's first production trades in July, ahead of the full launch of its service, ran on its own private network and on Canton, which DTCC called "a public network" (DTCC, 15 July 2026).

Products are moving more slowly than the rails. According to The Block, Morgan Stanley has pushed its plan to trade tokenized equities on its alternative trading system back to the first quarter of 2027, and Amy Oldenburg, its head of digital asset strategy, said: "And the client demand really isn't there because the product doesn't exist." (The Block, 12 October 2026). Her point is about sequence, with the product coming before the demand, and it does not sit comfortably with this piece's argument. The test, once the product exists, is whether it reaches anyone Morgan Stanley could not already serve.

The Largest Numbers Are Plumbing

Tessera's piece Count Holders, Not Dollars, first published on 12 August (republished here on 5 September), put it this way: "Most of the tokenized dollars in existence are institutional balance-sheet items that have been re-plumbed: the asset moved onto a better ledger without becoming available to anyone new." This month's figures show the same process running on busier rails. A Treasury that settles in minutes rather than a day can be cheaper to fund against, which matters to a funding desk, and the same piece named the beneficiary of that work as "the institution that already held the asset and now settles it faster and reconciles it more cheaply."

Going Public by Degrees, first published on 29 July (republished here on 30 July), drew a different line, between the institutions building the rails and the people the rails could reach. "Institutions already have IPO allocation channels and settlement infrastructure," it said, while "Retail starts elsewhere." On that line, every one of this month's largest numbers falls on the institutional side, and none reaches retail.

That is no criticism of the work. Faster and cheaper collateral is a real gain, and some of it may reach end investors as lower costs. It is still a separate thing from adoption by new holders. Count Holders, Not Dollars also said that the industry consensus that tokenization is "institution-first" "describes the first process and mistakes it for a description of the whole." We still think that line holds, though, as Scoring Our Own Test, first published on 21 October (republished here on 22 October), said, whether the holders on the other side amount to adoption is unproven.

Where DTC's Pilot Could Join the Two

DTCC is the place to watch. The SEC staff's no-action letter of 11 December 2025 limits the pilot to "(i) securities in the Russell 1000 Index … (ii) U.S. Treasury securities (i.e., bills, bonds, and notes), and (iii) ETFs that track major indices, such as the S&P 500 index and Nasdaq-100 index," and the relief is "withdrawn without further action three years from the date DTC launches operation of the Preliminary Base Version." Separately, the SEC has approved Nasdaq trading securities "in tokenized form during the pendency of" the DTC pilot, once DTC's infrastructure is in place and with at least 30 calendar days' notice to Nasdaq members (Release No. 34-105047, 18 March 2026).

If DTC's service launches, a first set of securities will gain tokenized entitlements inside the depository that already holds them. DTCC's scope document puts the number at 25 at launch, starting with select large-cap shares, ETFs and Treasuries, on the Canton Network and DTCC's private network, with more networks to follow (DTCC, "Tokenization Service: Scope at Launch and What's Next," undated, file created 16 October 2026). That would bring the institutional rail to assets retail investors already own.

Two Gates on Who Holds

Whether the tokens can move and whether the service changes who can hold them are separate questions. DTC would give participants a list of "public and private distributed ledgers" on which they could register wallets, and the SEC staff's letter sets the limit: "Only DTC Participants would be permitted to register wallets, and the relevant DTC Participant would be fully responsible for the activity in the Registered Wallet(s). The tokens would only be transferable to Registered Wallets." (no-action letter, 11 December 2025).

DTC's own request, attached to the letter, goes a step further: "Participants would be able to establish an unlimited number of Registered Wallets, including Registered Wallets for the benefit of their customers. Access to and use of Registered Wallets by a Participant's customers would be at the discretion of, and agreement between, the Participant and its customers." The same request is plain about who holds: "While a Participant may register a wallet for the benefit of its customer and even provide that customer with the keys to the wallet, during the operation of the Preliminary Base Version, DTC would only recognize the Participant as the entitlement holder and the Participant would be fully responsible for the activity in the Registered Wallet." DTCC's summary of the service at launch keeps that shape, listing "24/7 peer-to-peer transfers between registered wallets" and "Compliance-enabled tokens with transfer restrictions" (same document).

During the pilot, then, there are two gates. DTC decides which participants, chains and wallets are admitted, and recognizes only the participant as the holder. The participant decides whether a customer gets a wallet at all, and a retail customer who is given one would hold the keys without holding the entitlement.

RWA.xyz's framework counts tokens that move between whitelisted wallets as distributed (21 November 2025), so DTC's tokens could count as distributed whether or not anyone new holds them. Two things are worth watching: whether participants open these wallets to retail customers, and whether DTC ever recognizes anyone other than the participant as the holder. We have found nothing from DTCC or any participant saying that either will happen. Even if both did, who may hold a security would still be set by the rules rather than the rails, the point Going Public by Degrees made under the heading "The rails change before the rules."

The wallet limit also corrects an earlier description. Writing for Fintech Bloom on 8 July, Chan Ahn said: "The regulatory approval allows Nasdaq to test a system where investors can hold tokenized securities in digital wallets." For the pilot, that was too broad. At most, an investor could hold the keys to a wallet that a DTC participant registers for them, if the participant chooses to, and DTC would still recognize only the participant as the holder.

The Case Against This Reading

Daily repo volume can recycle the same collateral many times over, so $7.5 trillion in a month says more about how heavily the ledger is used than about how much sits on it. Broadridge has not named its participants in anything we have read, so we cannot say how concentrated that use is.

The institution-first path may also turn out to be the right description. If participants open DTC's registered wallets to their retail customers, the plumbing will have come first and access after it, which is close to the consensus Count Holders, Not Dollars disagreed with in August. Registered wallets with transfer restrictions are also close to the rights-first design that Something That Moves, first published on 28 September (republished here on 10 October), argued retail would not prefer. If retail arrives that way, it counts against that piece as well.

Where Tessera Sits

Tessera sits on the side where tokens can move between wallets. T-Tokens are tokenized loan participation rights providing economic exposure, settled on a public chain; they do not provide equity ownership, voting rights or direct shareholder status, and none of the institutional figures above includes them. Under Tessera's terms they are not available to persons in the US or other restricted territories, on any venue, and the point about who can hold DTC's tokens stands whatever any single issuer's eligibility map says. Tessera has a commercial interest in the wallet side mattering. The figures and quotations here are those of Broadridge, BNY, JPMorgan, DTCC, the SEC and RWA.xyz; the framing is Tessera's, and should be weighed accordingly.

Sources: Broadridge Financial Solutions, press release, 8 October 2026, and Distributed Ledger Repo product page, read 23 October 2026. BNY, press release, 13 October 2026. JPMorgan, Kinexys release on JPM Coin on Ethereum, 19 October 2026. DTCC, releases of 4 May 2026 and 15 July 2026, and "Tokenization Service: Scope at Launch and What's Next," undated PDF (file created 16 October 2026), read 24 October 2026. SEC Division of Trading and Markets, no-action letter to The Depository Trust Company, 11 December 2025, and DTC's request attached to it. SEC Release No. 34-105047 (Nasdaq), 18 March 2026. CoinDesk, 29 June 2026. The Block, 12 October 2026. RWA.xyz, app.rwa.xyz home, Treasuries and Broadridge DLR pages, read 26 October 2026, data timestamped 25 October 2026 at 06:04 (RWA.xyz gives no time zone). RWA.xyz (Bryan Choe), "A New Framework for Tokenized Assets: Distributed & Represented," 21 November 2025. Chan Ahn, "Balancing Innovation and Compliance," Fintech Bloom, 8 July 2026. Tessera, "Going Public by Degrees" (first published 29 July 2026, republished at blog.tessera.pe on 30 July 2026), "Count Holders, Not Dollars" (first published 12 August 2026, republished at blog.tessera.pe on 5 September 2026), "Something That Moves" (first published 28 September 2026, republished at blog.tessera.pe on 10 October 2026) and "Scoring Our Own Test" (first published 21 October 2026, republished at blog.tessera.pe on 22 October 2026), quoted as published at blog.tessera.pe.

This is market commentary, not investment advice. It is not a recommendation to acquire, hold or redeem any Tessera product, to use any platform mentioned, or to take or avoid exposure to any asset mentioned.

T-Tokens are tokenized loan participation rights, not equity. High risk. DYOR. Not financial advice. Not available in the US or other restricted territories. tessera.pe/terms